Memorable Event January 19, 1915 First Zeppelin Raid On England Click on Image for More Information

This Month's Special Feature 2004's Big News Stories With a Great War Handle

Story: Soaring Oil Prices

• The Politics of Oil
  

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  Story: Flu Vaccine Shortage [Memories of the Pandemic of 1918]

  
  
• The Brown University Influenza Project
  

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  Story: War in Iraq, Terrorism & Middle East Strife

• Great War Shapes the Middle East
• Brief History of Iraq to 2003
• Gertrude Bell and the Founding of Iraq
• Terrorism and Other Aftershocks of the Great War
  

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  Story: The US and Europe

• A Frenchman Looks at Anti-Americanism

My Aunt's Last Christmas Letter from the Front By Nelle Rote

[Editor's Comment: Nelle Rote of Pennsylvania enjoyed our special Christmas issue and thought our readers might like to read a holiday letter from her Aunt Helen Fairchild. Helen was an American nurse at Base Hospital 10, who died during her service in France. A bridge over the Susquehana River is named in her honor. (view photo)]

LeTreport, France
Saturday morning, December 29, 1917

Dearest Mother,

Just received at long, long last, a letter from you, the first in three weeks, so you can just imagine how awful glad I was to get it. Well, must tell you about Xmas. Unfortunately most of the things we had counted on having didn't come in time (that's what usually happens), and among the things that didn't come in time was the turkey for the Xmas dinner, but we substituted chicken for the nurses and the quarter master succeeded in getting goose for the patients, but we were rather disappointed not to have turkey for the patients, as the nurses, officers and men had given the money to buy the turkey, and we wanted them to have it. The Christmas bags that had been packed in Phila. didn't come, but we managed to have a nice Xmas. It was a fairly nice day and we had a party for the whole unit on Xmas eve.

Helen Fairchild

I did not go, but they said it was very nice and a choir of our nurses and some of the English men went all around the wards, and even came over to the offiers and nurses mess and sang Xmas carols Xmas eve. Then the nurses got up at 5:30 a.m. Xmas morn and made rounds in all the wards, singing Xmas songs. Of course, all the wards were decorated and we managed to find some little thing for each one of the patients. Then Xmas p.m. the officers gave a tea for the nurses and had real ice cream, which wasn't exactly like home, but tasted mighty good even at that.

But I was a lucky girl. I hadn't touched either of the boxes Edna sent me so I had them to enjoy Xmas day, and there were such nice things in them. A pair of the warmest slippers, pale blue, and a pair of white silk stockings and a little electric candle that will be so useful here. Then in the other box she had a perfect fruit cake and a big tin of home made candy and salted peanuts. In spite of the fact that I had kept those things for over two months, they were just as soft and fresh as could be. Everybody raved about that candy. Part of the fruit cake I gave to Miss Dunlop and the rest I wrapped up in a dandy cloth and am going to keep it a while longer. Miss Dunlop and several of the girls each gave me very pretty handkerchiefs, Major Harte gave me fruit, and Wagner gave me perfume, so I had a very nice day.

The remarks you made about ____ sounds just like her, but I admire the rest for their attitude because what the Red Cross and the Y.M.C.A. are doing for us over here means so much to us. Really, it would be awful to get along without the things they send us and most of the pleasure that the troops get are the ones provided for them by the Y.M.C.A., and if you could see what these boys have to go through sometimes I think even she might be willing to do without a banquet to help, as we share to give them any comfort possible.

If the time ever comes when some of our own are sent over here I guess she would be glad to have them taken care of when they are wounded, and without the supplies sent by the Red Cross Society, we could not do half as much for them as we are...

With heaps of love and thanks,
from your own Helen

Shell Shock Exhibit at the National Library of Medicine, National Institute of Health By Carol Clausen

I'm the curator of the current presentation on shell shock at the National Library of Medicine. It will run through the end of May. The exhibit grew out of my reading Pat Barker's wonderful novel, Regeneration. The novel is a fictionalized account of Siegfried Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers, the RAMC psychiatrist who treated him for shell shock in 1916. The very sympathetic picture Barker drew of Rivers made me want to learn more about him. I discovered a remarkable man who made his mark in neurology and anthropology before turning to psychiatry during the War. This wartime experience changed a shy and reclusive scholar into a warm and empathetic therapist who inspired gratitude and love from his patients..

Event Poster

Interest in Rivers led me to a general interest in shell shock, a fascinating subject because of its almost indefinable nature. It has puzzled physians since they first investigated it in the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Was its cause physical or purely psychological? Did some existing condition or personality type predispose one? Was it an illness at all or a normal, if extreme, coping mechanism when faced with an unbearable experience? What could account for the myriad symptoms, both physical and psychological? These questions provoked and disturbed the military and government authorities of all the European combatants of the Great War. They are still largely unanswered.

Following the elusive course of shell shock and its manifestation both before the Great War and since led me to a general interest in the soldiers's experience of the War and the conditions that had such terrible personal consequences. Two exhibit cases suggest these experiences with depictions of no man's land and a trench. Photographs from the Imperial War Museum, enlarged to life-size, form the backgrounds and appropriate artifacts are scattered on the ground - battlefield debris for no man's land and mess kit, canteen, trench lantern, etc. for the trench. This second case reflected my interest in the literary heritage of the War, with the stories of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Ivor Gurney, all of whom were affected in some manner by shell shock. (The title of the exhibit is taken from a Gurney poem.) It is meant to suggest the presence of a literary-minded British officer. So, falling out of a knapsack are my own copies of Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, published in 1917, one of the first books to describe the full horrors of the War and an influence on the British anti-war movement, and Homer's Odyssey, in Greek, of course (Oxford University Press, 1893), a story that has been interpreted (see Jonathan Shay's Odysseus In America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming), as a depiction of the traumatized soldier unable to find his way back to a normal life. For the entire exhibit is meant to be a commentary on the long-lasting and tragic destructiveness of war.

The National Libary of Medicine is part of the National Institute of Health and is located at 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894. The Libary is open to the public weekdays, 8:30-5:00.